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I don't think the author has the attitude he says he does. No-one truly can stand by the statement that everything they put online they expected to be public at

by buro9 16y ago

I don't think the author has the attitude he says he does. No-one truly can stand by the statement that everything they put online they expected to be public at some point. So, your banking is online, your email is online. Clearly you expect some things to not be public. The question is about where that line is and whether someone moves it without your say so. People would indeed freak at Google and banks if they revealed what they promised they wouldn't. And that is the issue with facebook, they told people they wouldn't share this stuff and so people used facebook to tell their close friends stuff and facebook moved the line, repeatedly.

deleted 16y ago
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derefr 16y ago
You're not putting your banking online—you're accessing a private service on an individual computer using a cryptographically-secure protocol. That's basically no different than having a direct hard line to the company's servers; there's no "Internet" involved, and therefore no "public" involved. Email is public. It is hugely vulnerable to MITM attacks at every step of the process, not in the least by the postmasters of Alice and Bob's companies or ISPs, both or which are subject to police search as well as social engineering under the guise of police search. Unless you create a secure channel over email, you should always treat everything you say in an email as if, well, it was posted on your facebook wall. No sending email to your human trafficking buddies, in other words.
- logic 16y ago
  I'm late to replying to this, but your response is the reason why many geeks don't get the problem here. None of what you just said makes any sense to my sister or my wife's aunt, both heavy Facebook users. "Cryptographically-secure", "MITM", and "social engineering" are meaningless phrases to them. They hear the word "email", and they think, "the Internet version of the letter I used to stick in a mailbox", and they make assumptions about the level of privacy their communications enjoy. They log on to Facebook, see a list of updates from people they know, and immediately have a feeling of close-knit community; it simply doesn't occur to many Facebook users that something like YourOpenBook could possibly exist. You and I understand and appreciate the subtleties of online communication. They don't.

by buro9 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

derefr 16y ago

You're not putting your banking online—you're accessing a private service on an individual computer using a cryptographically-secure protocol. That's basically no different than having a direct hard line to the company's servers; there's no "Internet" involved, and therefore no "public" involved. Email is public. It is hugely vulnerable to MITM attacks at every step of the process, not in the least by the postmasters of Alice and Bob's companies or ISPs, both or which are subject to police search as well as social engineering under the guise of police search. Unless you create a secure channel over email, you should always treat everything you say in an email as if, well, it was posted on your facebook wall. No sending email to your human trafficking buddies, in other words.

logic 16y ago
I'm late to replying to this, but your response is the reason why many geeks don't get the problem here. None of what you just said makes any sense to my sister or my wife's aunt, both heavy Facebook users. "Cryptographically-secure", "MITM", and "social engineering" are meaningless phrases to them. They hear the word "email", and they think, "the Internet version of the letter I used to stick in a mailbox", and they make assumptions about the level of privacy their communications enjoy. They log on to Facebook, see a list of updates from people they know, and immediately have a feeling of close-knit community; it simply doesn't occur to many Facebook users that something like YourOpenBook could possibly exist. You and I understand and appreciate the subtleties of online communication. They don't.